Lauren Redniss Is Inventing a New Literary Genre

"My anxiety is about time…that time is slipping away too quickly," says Lauren Redniss, who is, in no particular order: a reporter, a painter, a social historian, a biographer, and a feminist who creates stories and tableaux that are published as books, which are at once sexual and prim, grotesque and romantic, scientific and soft. "I always felt like I needed to hold on to things because they might slip away, and that impulse was stronger than any other fear," she says. "So I made sure I was always drawing and writing and recording things, and it became natural to put them together in some way."

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Put them together in some way is a typical Redniss understatement. Her first book, Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies, was discovered by publishing dervish Judith Reagan at a mutual friend's house and earned Redniss instantly admiring reviews, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a second book deal, for Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. This tells Marie Curie's story along with the history of atomic power; the cover actually glows in the dark. It's an unquestionable masterpiece and was nominated for a National Book Award. (The nominators wrote of her: "She has expanded the realm of nonfiction." Malcolm Gladwell, an ex who is now a good friend, opined in a New Yorker blog post, "It should have won.") Jean Strouse, the director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where Redniss was a fellow, describes showing Century Girl to an art critic friend. "He was paging through and said, 'She's inventing a new art form!' It's not any of the things we can normally call it; it's not a graphic novel, it's an art book, but of such a particular kind."

Lauren Redniss

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Redniss's latest work, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future, expands her biographical impulse to encompass what reads like the story of the whole world. "We can estimate and predict so much about weather. But there's always an element of the unknown, and that's where it's a metaphor for us as a species, our achievements and our limitations," she says. The reader willing to put herself fully in Redniss's hands will be rewarded with a delicious feeling of being enveloped by a phenomenon that eclipses the chiming trivialities of daily life. About halfway through Thunder's fourth chapter, which deftly ranges from visiting royals fogged in on boats to the meteorological conditions that cause fog to the lives of lighthouse keepers and the advances in warning-beacon technology, is a spread of two pure-gray pages, with a few murky darker patches that might be land masses or merely deceptive color variations in the mist. The only words on the two pages are those of the Canadian Coast Guard superintendent of navigation, Paul Bowering: "You get pretty itchy after awhile, and you start"…and then, alone on the right-hand page, tucked in the bottom corner, in Redniss's hand-lettered typeface nestled in the etched gray…"doubting yourself."

Redniss herself is unplagued by doubt. I keep asking, as if questioning the sphinx, how she had the wherewithal to forge ahead with this illuminated, slow, anti-hype, experiential work in an age of short attention spans—the viral reality and sense of being if not bombarded, then infected by, information. We're talking in the corner loft in Brooklyn that she shares with her husband, Jody Rosen, cultural reporter at large for T magazine, her two-year-old son, and her eleven-year-old stepson. Their place is a reasonable size by New York City standards, but Redniss has to put up a Murphy bed first thing in the morning to transform their sleeping chamber into her office.

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In the apartment building's shared courtyard, barre-bodied mothers play with their Makié- and Mini Boden-clad offspring, but Redniss's oversize windows look out on New York Harbor. While she works she gazes at the cruise ships, water taxis, tugboats, Statue of Liberty, Red Hook projects, and freeway arteries. This perch is analogous to her literary one, where she seems to be both in the fray—Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Skloot, and Dave Eggers all blurb Thunder—and floating above the vanity fair like a naïf or an alien examining the strange truths of being an earthling.

Unlike Thunder—which has sproinged out of its tightly orchestrated final form to reveal its inner workings in sketchbooks, collages, paintings, pages of alphabets rendered and re-rendered, and hand-bound early drafts that Redniss has laid on her dining room table for me—the author is circumspect. She claims not to know sales numbers and is unwilling to tell me her advance amounts or her age. Also like the sphinx, and also not unlike the folkloric creatures she draws, Redniss has huge, huge hazel eyes that refuse to reveal too much information, even as they promise infinite wisdom. She's ridiculously beautiful, blonde, and slender. It's such a fact that even though it's always tricky to refer to the looks of women, to not say it would feel like lying by omission.

Lauren Redniss

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Redniss does tell me that she was around 24 when she published her first Op-Art for the New York Times editorial page (which means she is in her late thirties), and was soon a regular contributor getting noticed for her delicate-but-not-hesitant drawings crammed between dense hand-lettering that could tell an elaborate story in a single panel, often on unexpected subjects such as two gay soldiers in World War II or the poet Stanley Kunitz's pet bobcat. But she still couldn't sell her first book.

"I did a good portion of it before there was any interest, and it was rejected by every publisher out there," she says. "I think people didn't know what to make of it. I had an agent, and even her assistant stopped returning my calls."

Redniss trained in ballet into her late twenties, which helps explain her air of old-world formality, of being both chic and also outside of fashion, of contemporaneity. It also offers a key to the steely ambition beneath her softness that insists the stories she makes and the story of her own life will follow her own magical choreography. "I had a teacher who always talked about supple strength. It's a literal thing in the body, but it's also a metaphor you could bring to anything in life."

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She grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, her mother a dancer and teacher, her father an urban planner, but considers her formative days those spent helping at her grandfather and great-uncle's bodega in a down-and-out corner of Worcester, Massachusetts. Another person might recall the despair in that corner, where holdups were not infrequent, but in Redniss's telling it sounds joyful. "My favorite part of the store was near the cash register, where the 'art supplies' were," she says, laughing. "I'd make the customers necklaces from those garbage ties."

She went to Brown University, then moved to New York after graduation with plans to be a painter, but found it isolating. "At 20 years old, how much time did I want to spend in my studio thinking about myself? I wanted to be more engaged in the world," she says. She also eighty-sixed a brief scheme for a PhD in botany, because a lab job and a stint as an artist in residence at the American Museum of Natural History, diligently drafting turtle fossils, left her cold. She loved science but found more kinship with the highly interpretive pre-twenty-first-century naturalists. In an MFA program at NYC's School of Visual Arts, she honed her hybrid approach.

Redniss has sketches buried somewhere on her computer for a future line of dresses based on trees: "There are these Puerto Rican royal palms that have these incredible striping patterns," she says. Today she's wearing the neutral shirt and cropped pants that mothers of young children adopt, but if her budget allowed it, she'd wear Viktor & Rolf or Valentino, and her closet is stuffed with flimsy patterned dresses that would look pretty on her in any era. She pulls out a sweatshirt covered in shooting stars and one emblazoned with Bengal tigers by the Swedish brand Mini Rodini, which she bought in children's large. "The things that I'm drawn to are utterly impractical: sparkling, iridescent, and rainbow," she says. "There are reality clothes and fantasy clothes, and I'd rather be in fantasy clothes."

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For months after her now husband contacted Redniss through email (he'd seen Century Girl in a bookshop and wanted to write about her), she believed that because his name is Jody, he was a woman. "I thought, How nice of this woman to write me! We had a lovely email friendship." Eventually they met, but didn't become romantically involved for years. When I ask if she always had a crush, all she'll reveal of their romance is a whispered "Probably."

Redniss agrees she isn't the sort to get hung up on an unavailable man. Any such obsessive energy is channeled into feverishly recording her world in notebooks. And while she says she doesn't want to be "didactic or overly moralistic," both Century Girl and Radioactive are stealth feminist. There's a hilarious and spot-on page in the latter that features a blown-up black-and-white photo of Curie in front of a sea of male faces in the audience. It's just after Pierre, the love of her life, has been killed by a carriage. She's been awarded his job, the first female professor in the Sorbonne's 650-year history. "I have been named to your chair," Marie says. "There have been some imbeciles to congratulate me on it."

I tell Redniss that her history as a dancer explains so much about her work, with its incredible ability to convey stillness and motion, time and space, and her artist's eyes fill briefly with tears, seeming to telegraph both the pleasure of being recognized and appreciated for one's toil and devotion, and the painful vulnerability of pouring oneself, however artfully hidden, onto the page and into the world.

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